The first diagram is one year’s worth of statistics, showing the daily and monthly average of concurrent Sansar users. There is a noticable spike in users around the time of the Steam launch on both graphs:

Gindipple also shared the following graph, saying:

Of particular interest is this graph that shows the last 2 weeks. The spikes are the comedy event and a product meetup.

The news from both sets of graphs is about the same. Both show a noticeable spike in Sansar usage due to the Steam launch, but unfortunately, many of those users did not seem to stick around. However, there does seem to be a small uptick in the total number of simultaneous Sansar users overall, comparing the periods before and after the Steam launch.

Also, both Galen’s and Gindipple’s statistics show that Sansar is now hitting up to 80 concurrent users at a time, mostly due to events such as the stand-up comedy series. This is a definite improvement, although I’m quite sure that Linden Lab wants much higher numbers than that.

So, the struggle continues. And Linden Lab is far from alone in trying to figure out the magic formula that will bring users in—and make them come back. The only social VR platform which is still consistently packing the users in is VRChat (with Rec Room a distant second).

Linden Lab has released a Second Life End-of-Year Update, outlining some of the achievements and events of 2018, and things are looking pretty good overall.

They shared some statistics on user concurrency, which show that it has remained steady over the past two years. It’s not increasing, but it’s not going down, either, which is encouraging:

As the year comes to a close, we’ve rounded up some interesting statistics to share insight into how the Second Life community is spending its time and money.

One thing is clear: Second Lifers were a busy bunch in 2018. You spent an estimated 336 million hours inworld in the past year alone! And there are 50 million+ chat messages daily.

Our daily concurrency rates remain stable, too. Take a look at this chart, which shows the overall traffic trends on logged in Second Life users over the past two years.

Pictured: Second Life concurrency rates from early 2017 to late 2018.

Also, They shared some stats about sales this year, and they’re pretty good too:

This active population helped keep the Second Life economy healthy in 2018. Approximately $65 million was paid out to Residents in the past year for a variety of items and services. On the Marketplace, there are currently over 5 million virtual goods for sale. Since we lowered prices on the Mainland and maintenance fees on Private Estates, we’ve seen some growth in the overall land market as well. For example, we saw increases across the board in land ownership – more Region owners, more parcel owners, more group-owned land, more Regions on the Grid. As many owners traded up from Openspaces and Homesteads to full Regions to take full advantage of the lower pricing, we saw growth in overall SQM owned by Residents.

Gindipple posted the following pie chart to the official Sansar Discord channel (click on the picture to go to Flickr and see it in a larger size):

Gindipple explains that the high figures for one experience, Fnatic (the green slice in the pie chart), were due to people coming into that experience to get a prize key for another game. Which might be the very first occurrence of somebody gaming the traffic figures in Sansar (a long-standing practice in Second Life).

So, go explore! There has been a definite increase in the number of new people visiting Sansar since it was launched on Steam this past Wednesday. And Friday night at the TurnupVR-sponsored pub crawl was amazing! Over 32 people showed up at Solas’ bar and danced, laughed and broke bottles. It was absolute chaos at times, with everybody excitedly talking over each other, and it reminded me of the early days of VRChat. I think we can say that Sansar has definitely arrived!

Now that Linden Lab has launched on Steam, we have quite a few different statistics available, some of which may which may contradict each other. Gindipple recently shared some rather encouraging statistics on the official Sansar Discord, which show an overall increasing trend in the average number of daily and monthly Sansar users:

Gindipple’s and Galen’s statistics will differ because they take samples of the user data at different times, using a publicly available API. One may sample the data more often than another; I don’t know how often Gindipple samples the data, but Galen says he takes a sample approximately every 10 minutes.

Steam tracks [people] logged in via Steam. Gindipple]/Galen log people in [Sansar] experiences that are public. We [Linden Lab] count them all – regardless how they logged in, where they are or what they do. 3 different numbers where ours will always be the bigger, sum of all, number.

As far as I am aware, Linden Lab does not publish their statistics, which are internal to the company. (If this is incorrect, then could somebody from Linden Lab let me know, and then I will update this blogpost accordingly, thank you!)

Interestingly, please notice that the latter Steam graph gives a different 24-hour peak usage than the former (the top one says the peak usage in the past 24 hours is 65 users, while the bottom one says it is 75).

So now we have a wealth of different data showing us just how much Sansar is being used! This is a vast improvement over the early days in Sansar, where most of the time we had to guess how many people were using the platform.